Error starting webmin

Installed virtualmin on CentOS 7(Godaddy VPS). Everything upto date. Installation succeeds but webmin does not start.

systemctl start webmin.service Job for webmin.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status webmin.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

systemctl status -l webmin.service
webmin.service - LSB: Start or stop the Webmin server
Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/webmin; bad; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed 2017-01-11 06:44:33 UTC; 4min 25s ago
Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
Process: 2555 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/webmin start (code=exited, status=97)

journalctl -xe
Jan 11 07:02:09 s166-.secureserver.net /usr/sbin/irqbalance[180]: WARN
Jan 11 07:02:19 s166-
.secureserver.net /usr/sbin/irqbalance[180]: WARN
Jan 11 07:02:29 s166-.secureserver.net /usr/sbin/irqbalance[180]: WARN
Jan 11 07:02:29 s166-
.secureserver.net ksmtuned[186]: /usr/sbin/ksmtun
Jan 11 07:02:30 s166-.secureserver.net polkitd[172]: Registered Authen
Jan 11 07:02:30 s166-
.secureserver.net webmin[3262]: Webmin starting
Jan 11 07:02:31 s166-*.secureserver.net polkitd[172]: Unregistered Auth

What needs to be done to resolve this?

Please help.

I don’t see any useful errors there. What’s in the miniserv.error log? (/var/webmin/miniserv.error)

There is no error log.

tail /var/webmin/miniserv.error:
tail: cannot open /var/webmin/miniserv.error\u2019 for reading: No such file or directory

tail /var/webmin/webmin.log:
1484114799.14491.0 [11/Jan/2017 06:06:39] - - - virtual-server run-postinstalls.pl “postinstall” “-” “-”

No one has encountered this issue? Are there any other places where errors may be recorded?

webmin.log is the actions log; I don’t think it would ever contain anything relevant to starting up.

miniserv.error is the right log for this; the fact that you don’t even have that is interesting. But, it’s not a problem I’ve seen before; anytime I’ve ever seen Webmin not start, there was some hint about it in miniserv.error. Often it’d be that something was already on port 10000 (or the service had been moved to another port that already had a service running on it).

Is there anything in the kernel log? dmesg will give you the current kernel log.

Is there free disk space? Is SELinux policy blocking it from starting?

Exact same problem with me and host in time4vps. Fresh install on Centos 7 and up to date. No file /var/webmin/miniserv.error

I found the solution here:
https://community.time4vps.eu/discussion/199/virtualmin-unable-to-install-regardless-of-what-i-try
It has to do with the ipv6 support on webmin and time4vps

Webmin/Virtualmin doesnt require IPv6 to install or work properly. Only thing what comes into my mind is if Time4VPS is using some modified templates what could cause the install to fail. Anything else like what IPs are available it will not cause any problem and Webmin/Virtualmin should install without any problem. If this problem persist you should talk with your host as this is not something what could be influenced by Webmin/Virtualmin.

For a long time i have one VPS dedicated to test this control panel and with (full) Centos 6 or 7 i never had any serious problems. Maybe some sporadic bugs but nothing what could cause this control panel to become unresponsive (or fail to install).

On centos make sure you have all the required perl modules. Check the log. On a minimal install I had to:
tail /var/webmin/miniserv.error
yum -i perl-Authen-PAM perl-Socket6

I updated webmin and webmin failed to restart.
Nothing informative in miniserv.error.
To find out what the problem was, I had to run:

# /etc/webmin/start`
Starting Webmin server in /usr/share/webmin
Failed to open SSL cert /home/somevirtualhostuser/ssl.cert at /usr/share/webmin/miniserv.pl line 4418.

ls /home/somevirtualhostuser/ssl*

ssl.ca ssl.ca.lock ssl.cert.lock ssl.combined

I discovered that after the update, a bunch of my virtualhosts were pointing to the same ssl.cert filepath – a filepath that didn’t exist.

To get webmin running again I had to go into each of the /var/apache2/sites-enabled/*.conf files that referenced the nonexistent file and comment out all SSL directives in the 443 virtual hosts that referenced the nonexistent file AND edit /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf to delete all references to the nonexistent file.

Very strange.

Thanks for the input and troubleshooting here guys… we’re looking into a better way of handling this issue in Webmin.

-Eric

For anyone troubleshooting webmin startup issues with silent miniserv.error file, the key here is:

# /etc/webmin/start

This command produces more output that allows you to see the error. For me this error occurred because I started renaming stuff, particularly the main domain on which Virtualmin was hosted. To temporary work around the problem I copied ssl.cert and ssl.key into a folder which existed before.